Ambient Proximity Is The Next Phase Of Location Sharing. It’s not where your friends are, but how close they are that matters.
After years of exact coordinate checkins, both Foursquare and Facebook are now focusing on ambient proximity — constantly and automatically sharing your approximate distance from close friends. Ambient proximity lets you know if a friend is near enough to meet up with, yet without the creepiness of seeing their every move on a map. That balance could finally make location sharing appealing to the masses.
Foursquare’s new ambient proximity app Swarm was announced today and will become available in the coming weeks. It creates a feed of your best friends lumped into groups based on how far away they are, like around 500 feet or about a mile. Checkins and exact ambient location sharing certainly never caught on with the general public. Facebook launched Places for checkins, but location-tagged photos and status updates have proven more popular. A Eulogy for Twitter - Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer.
The beloved social publishing platform enters its twilight.
We've been trying to figure out the moment Twitter turned, retracing tweets to see whether there was something specific that soured the platform. Something is wrong on Twitter. This Monstrous Linksys WRT1900AC Router Is For Folks With A Real Appetite For Networking. There are wireless routers, and then there are wireless routers with a 1.2GHz dual-core Marvel Armada SoC processor and 256MB RAM that supports USB 3.0 drive transfer speeds and has four massive antennae that can blow wireless connectivity through almost any environment.
The $250 Linksys WRT1900AC (which you can win here) is the latter. So what’s so special about this massive wireless writer and why am I writing about it? Home and small office networking folks have never been given the chance to play with heavy iron. In between the run-of-the-mill wireless router and the $31,000 Cisco machine we find very few highly programmable, very powerful networking tools that allow for instant NAS setup, usable wireless management, and high speed connectivity. If I were setting up a network from scratch for a whole office and needed a backup solution, some parental controls, and some clever network mapping tools, this would be the router I’d use. Another big plus is Linksys’ clever interface. Meet the manic miner who wants to mint 10% of all new bitcoins. In a couple of large buildings near the Columbia River in Eastern Washington, where hydroelectricity is cheap and plentiful, Dave Carlson oversees what he says is one of the largest Bitcoin mining operations on the planet.
At any given time, Carlson's goal is to account for seven to 10 percent of the entire world's Bitcoin mining as measured by processing or hashing power, he said. At the moment, he's slightly below that target but doesn't expect to remain below it for very long. The operations are fueled by thousands of mining rigs containing more than 1.4 million BitFury mining chips, while Raspberry Pis loaded with custom software direct traffic on each rig. "We were looking for the lowest cost, highest volume production, tiny computer controller that had the ability to integrate with another electronic board design. There are many out there, but the Raspberry Pi is something like 40 bucks," Carlson told Ars.
Raspberry Pi clone beefs up CPU, adds SATA A $49 community-backed “Banana Pi” SBC is a Raspberry Pi lookalike, but uses a faster, dual-core Allwinner A20 SoC and adds SATA and several other features.
Shenzhen China based Lemaker.org has launched its Banana Pi single board computer for $49 plus shipping at Ali Express. The Banana Pi is aimed at Raspberry Pi users who want a more powerful processor without abandoning the comfort and convenience of a familiar board design. First noticed by CNXSoft, the board has dimensions, port positions, and 24-pin header layout similar to the Raspberry Pi, and supports the same add-on modules, says Lemaker.org. Banana Pi front (left) and back (click images to enlarge) The Banana Pi may be a near clone of the $35 Raspberry Pi Model B, but it’s equipped with a much faster processor and adds features like SATA support.
Raspberry Pi Cluster. Recently, I’ve completed construction of a 40-node computing cluster based on the Raspberry Pi single board computer.
Below is a quick overview video, showing the finished product. And here’s another one showing a few of the basics about how the case works. 40-Node Raspberry Pi Cluster Built By David Guill. If you enjoy building projects using the awesome Raspberry Pi mini PC you might be interested in this new creation in the form of a 40-Node Raspberry Pi cluster complete with custom-made case.
The 40-Node Raspberry Pi cluster Has been created by David Guill an electrical engineer who recently constructed 40-node computing cluster based on the Raspberry Pi single board computer. Check out the videos after the jump to learn more about his creation. The consists of 40 cores Broadcom BCM2835 @700 MHz, 20 GB total distributed RAM and 20 GB total distributed RAM.
“In the practical sense, this is a supercomputer which has been scaled down to the point where the entire system is about as fast as a nice desktop system. A Guerilla Usability Test on Dropbox Photos — User Experience Research. Dropbox is a great product, but a quick usability test reveals that people run into two critical issues with Dropbox’s Photos feature.
Objective Identify the pain points of Dropbox’s current “Photos” interface: Test Parameters What: Dropbox web app platform.Who: Existing Dropbox users who own photos.Where: Screen passerbys outside of a coffee shop, SF. Test tasks. Charting Bitcoin's Unsteady Rise. What Google really means when it calls Android 'open' The gooey center of Google's pitch to developers to make apps and services for Android is a series of terms easily misunderstood, but central to Android's flexibility and success.
Every once in a while, Android terminology discussions flare up like a stomach ulcer for Google. They center on Android's nature as a development platform, which in turn affects the variety and breadth of Android apps -- from Minecraft to Pandora to the latest Flappy Bird copycats -- that you can download, and how up-to-date they are. Is Android truly open-source? ‘Our Mathematical Universe,’ by Max Tegmark. Halfway into his new book, “Our Mathematical Universe,” the M.I.T. physicist Max Tegmark describes his “Dr.
Jekyll/Mr. Hyde Strategy”: During the day he would do respectable work on mainstream topics in cosmology, but at night he would “transform into the evil Mr. Hyde” and indulge in writing “wacky” papers on “the ultimate nature of reality.” The Gun That Aims Itself (Documentary) Are these pictures of water flowing on Mars, right now? I'm not a smart person when it comes to science, but I'm curious if it has to be water? I know they're going with this based on the 'iron/water mixture' idea, but I know that there are methane lakes on Titan so I'm wondering what other possible liquids it could be. Well, they've already done chemical analyses of the soil and atmosphere, so I'd presume they would know if it was methane.
Or I hope so, anyway. So first off methane in liquid form would require intense pressure or cold. Methane is usually a gas here on earth because our pressure combined with temperature makes it take a gaseous state naturally. For the range of temperature and pressure we can measure on mars, anything flowing would really only be in the H2O molecule in liquid form. 5 ways China's WeChat is more innovative than you think. Tech in Asia has been covering WeChat, China’s most popular mobile message app, before it even had an English name.
Meanwhile, international tech media outlets (including ourselves) have also been following the evolution of other messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Line, Facebook Messenger, and many, many others. Over the past year or so there’s been lots of talk about how these messengers are maturing into “platforms” – or, apps that users will use to buy things, and that business and organizations can use to reach an audience. However, as others have correctly pointed out, it’s not appropriate to lump China’s WeChat alongside these other chat apps. This is in large part because it’s simply far ahead of its like-minded competitors with respect to the “platform” side of things. When a user opens up WeChat in any language other than Chinese, they’ll likely see a messaging app that, for the most part, looks and works just like Line or Viber. 1.
Apple: We’re the patent trolls’ top target, facing 92 lawsuits in 3 years. Recent public comments by Apple show that the Cupertino gadget company has reason to believe it's the most popular target of so-called "patent trolls," companies whose only business is suing over patents. "No firm has been targeted by PAEs more than Apple," wrote Apple in public comments filed with the Federal Trade Commission. "Apple has litigated against PAEs 92 times in the past three years alone and has received many more demands.
" Graphene conducts electricity ten times better than expected. John Hankinson/Georgia Tech Electrons (blue in this artist's impression) travel nearly unimpeded along ribbons of graphene (black) that have been grown on steps etched in silicon carbide (yellow atoms). Physicists have produced nanoribbons of graphene — the single-atom-thick carbon — that conduct electrons better than theory predicted even for the most idealized form of the material. The finding could help graphene realize its promise in high-end electronics, where researchers have long hoped it could outperform traditional materials such as silicon. In graphene, electrons can move faster than in any other material at room temperature. City to push people into Hebei as pop tops 21 million - Beijing Today. Democrats Introduce Open Internet Preservation Act To Restore Net Neutrality.
Democrats in the House and Senate today introduced the Open Internet Preservation Act, a bill that would reinstate now-defunct net neutrality rules that were shot down last month. Net neutrality, in its most basic form, is the idea that ISPs must treat all Internet data the same. Under its regime, ISPs are not allowed to selectively speed up or slow down information requested by their customers due to their selective gatekeeping of the services impacted. Or, more simply, Comcast can’t decide that a site you want to load, or a video you want to watch, should be slowed, and content that it prefers, accelerated. Tories' 'Year of Code' boss Lottie Dexter can't code.
Blockchain.info Team Blog. Intel Galileo. Elsevier opens its papers to text-mining. Academics: prepare your computers for text-mining. The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz. The Best Electronics Starter Kits. Philip K. Dick Theorizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in “A Computer-Programmed Reality” Physicists say energy can be teleported 'without a limit of distance' A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life. Tek 520A VectorClock! Watch Steve Jobs Show Off the Mac in Footage Unseen Since 1984. Throwing Snowballs Is for Losers Who Don't Have Specialized Weaponry.
BeWifi lets you steal your neighbor’s bandwidth when they’re not using it. Modems, wArEz, and ANSI art: Remembering BBS life at 2400bps. The 7 Most Intriguing Philosophical Arguments for the Existence of God. 12 of the most astounding 'living fossils' known to science. Soldering tiny SMD components the easy and fast way (with a hotplate) Sex Toys Of The Future, According To The Adult Entertainment Expo (NSFW)
How The Human Brain Creates Consciousness. Our First Glimpse of the Web that Connects All Galaxies. First Google Glass App for Sex Sees Everything (Yes, Everything) It was bound to happen: A developer claims that he built the first Google Glass app designed for sex. The Humble Toothbrush Gets an Internet Makeover. Neil deGrasse Tyson: Science and Religion Are Not ‘Reconcilable,’ So Stop Trying. Human Brain in 3-D Detail. Discovery of Quantum Vibrations in 'Microtubules' Inside Brain Neurons Supports Controversial Theory of Consciousness. With Emotion Recognition Algorithms, Computers Know What You’re Thinking.
2014: a year for synthetic biology, dark matter, and more! UTAustinX: UT.6.01x: Embedded Systems - Shape The World. Infinite series: When the sum of all positive integers is a small negative fraction. Spark.io Hackers Make An Open-Source Nest Thermostat. Rewinding to Betamax: The path to consumers’ “right to record” 7 classic versions of Windows and Mac OS you can run in a browser. Astounding Result - Numberphile. Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules. Thorium-Fueled Automobile Engine Needs Refueling Once a Century - Industry Tap. Should We Colonise the Moon? How vinyl records are made (1956) China's Moon Rover Snaps a View of Earth We Haven't Seen in 40 Years. 50 Best Natural History Blogs. 50 Best Natural History Blogs. Creating your First Multi-touch Table. Beautiful electric bicycles.
Wearable Technologies. For Couples Split by Distance, Two Screens Can Blink as One. Why Is the Solar System Flat? T-Mobile Will Pay Your Early Termination Fee If You Switch. Why You Should Upload Yourself to a Supercomputer. An entirely new class of galaxy-escaping hypervelocity stars. T-Mobile CEO: “This industry blows,” biggest carriers offer “horsesh**” Beautiful electric bicycles. Faraday’s Stylish New Bicycle Will Change How You Think About E-Bikes. Media Player. An insight into the life of a travelling student.
From Linux-powered warships to robot bears, the year in Ars Tech Lab. Polynesians may have beat computers to using binary. Apple’s incremental 2013—and what to expect in 2014. The Day Google Had to 'Start Over' on Android - Fred Vogelstein. Seismologists offer explanation for mysterious aerial light orbs preceding quakes. Thorium put to use, kills a few more versions of Supersymmetry. Teleza Turns Your Mobile Device Into A Dual-SIM Powerhouse. Stunning photography of man's mightiest shame. How US Internet service might get better—and worse—in 2014. Such Hack. Many Dogecoin. Very Disappear. So Gone. Wow. Source Code in TV and Films. You Probably Don't Have Bipolar Disorder (Or One Of These 7 Other Conditions)
Billion-dollar climate denial network exposed. The Objects in Space That We Really, Really Can't Explain. Visit to the World's Fair of 2014. #3 Parallel Worlds exist and will soon be testable, expert says. Reflected hidden faces in photographs revealed in pupil. Capturing images of bystanders by zooming in on pictures of corneas.
Asia’s Richest Man Invests In BitPay. We're About to Lose Net Neutrality — And the Internet as We Know It. Biggest Scientific Breakthroughs of 2013. Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: The Year of the Oculus Rift. These Vintage Videos Accurately Predicted Today's Technology. Advanced Imaging Reveals a Computer 1,500 Years Ahead of Its Time. Tikker. We're About to Lose Net Neutrality — And the Internet as We Know It. The darkly funny drawings of Laurie Lipton. For some government agencies, it’s only official if it’s on floppies. How Does Apple Really Feel About Bitcoin?